DFINITY - Due Diligence

[icochecker]

DFINITY (DFN)

Team

R&D

• Dominic Williams (Chief Scientist) - Jan 2015 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Medium | Github profile shows that joined Dfinity org on 10 Sep 2016
• Timo Hanke (Head of Engineering) - Jul 2016 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github
• Ben Lynn (Senior Staff Scientist & Engineer) - May 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Blogger | Github
• Andreas Rossberg (Senior Staff Scientist & Engineer) | No Linkedin profile | Blogger | Github profile shows that joined Dfinity org on 2 Jan 2018
• Mahnush Movahedi (Senior Researcher and Engineer) - Jun 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Github | Yale page
• Martin Becze (Virtual Machine Research) | No Linkedin profile | Github profile shows that joined Dfinity org on 12 Sep 2017
• Paul Liu (Staff Engineer) - Dec 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Blogger | Github
• Shigeo Mitsunari (Staff Cryptographer) | Linkedin profile Does not mention DFINITY | Github profile shows that joined Dfinity org on 23 Mar 2017 | Personal Page
• Enzo Haussecker (Senior Engineer) - Month? 2018 - Present | Linkedin profile
• Norton Wang (Software Engineer) - Feb 2018 - Present | Linkedin profile
• Ximin Luo (Software Engineer) | Linkedin profile Does not mention DFINITY | Debian | Github profile shows that joined Dfinity org on 28 Feb 2018
• Steve Omohundro (Senior Contributor - AI/Governance Research) | Linkedin profile Does not mention DFINITY | Twitter | Personal Website
• Robert Lauko (Contributor - Research/Community) - Jul 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile

Operations

• Tom Ding (CEO, String Labs & SV Liaison) | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github
• Artia Moghbel (Head of Operations) - May 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter
• Blair Lewis (Head of Talent) - Jan 2018 - Present | Linkedin profile
• Arthur Falls (Director of Communications) - Nov 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter
• Michael Hunte (Director of Community Operations) - Jan 2018 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter
• Tomomi Menjo (Project Coordinator) - Month? 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter
• Cedric Waldburger (Swiss Operations Manager) - Sep 2016 - Present | Linkedin profile

DEDIS at EPFL

• Prof. Bryan Ford (Team Lead) | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github | Personal Blog
• Philipp Jovanovic (Research Scientist) - May 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github
• Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias (Doctoral Researcher) - May 2017 - Present | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github
• Prof. Ewa Syta (Research Scientist) | Personal page | Twitter
• Stevens Le Blond (Research Scientist) | Github
• Linus Gasser (Software Engineer) | Linkedin profile | Twitter | Github
• Cristina Basescu (Doctoral Researcher) | Linkedin profile | Github
• Nicolas Gailly (Security Software Engineer) | Linkedin profile | Github

Advisors

No advisors

Company

DFINITY Stiftung (Foundation)

Gotthardstrasse 20
6300 Zug
Switzerland
Registered on: 09 Nov 2016
UID: CHE-189.770.146
Commercial register number: CH-170.7.000.789-7

Purpose: Förderung von neuen Technologieentwicklungen und Applikationen, insbesondere die Förderung und Erhaltung von neuen offenen dezentralisierten Softwarearchitekturen. Im Vordergrund - aber nicht ausschliesslich - steht dabei die Förderung der Entwicklung des so genannten DFINITY Protokolls und die entsprechende Technologie sowie die Förderung und Unterstützung von Applikationen unter Anwendung des DFINITY Protokolls; vollständige Zweckumschreibung gemäss Statuten

Purpose (translated to EN): Promote new technology developments and applications, in particular the promotion and maintenance of new open decentralized software architectures. In the foreground - but not exclusively - is the promotion of the development of the so-called DFINITY protocol and the corresponding technology as well as the promotion and support of applications using the DFINITY protocol; complete purpose description according to the Articles of Association.

Management

• Dominic Williams | Foundation board-President
• Gian Alexandre Bochsler | Foundation board-Member
• MUTARA Audit AG (CHE-113.025.688), in Baar | Audit

Source

• Kanton Zug commercial register

DFINITY ECOSYSTEM FUND LP

Source: Reuters

File Number: 6711235
Incorporation Date / Formation Date: 16 January 2018
Entity Kind: Corporation
Entity Type: General
Residency: Domestic
State: Delaware
Industry: Pooled Investment Fund

Address:
548 Market Street Suite 64375
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Phone: 415-613-5108

Registered Address:
VCORP SERVICES, LLC
1013 CENTRE ROAD SUITE 403-B
WILMINGTON
New Castle County
Delaware 19805
USA

Directors and Executives

• Polychain Venture Partners LLC | General Partner
  548 Market Street
  Suite 64375
  San Francisco
  CALIFORNIA 94104
  USA

• Olaf Carlson-Wee | Managing Member of the General Partner
  548 Market Street
  Suite 64375
  San Francisco
  CALIFORNIA 94104
  USA

Form D - 13 feb 2018

Exemptions

• Rule 506(b)
• Investment Company Act Section 3(c)
• Section 3(c)(7)

Smart contract

STIFTUNG Dfinity FDC

Github

• Dfinity

Commits

Product

Demo (Walkthrough of private testnet on youtube)

Asked by user on 26 Feb 2018

Vesting

• N/A

Additional info

5 April 2008

• Crowdsale cancelled.
• DFINITY will be airdropping up to 25M Swiss Francs worth of DFN to community members. KYC and AML will be required. US individuals will not be able to participate
• DFINITY will be raising approximately 90M Swiss Francs in a private presale.

29 March 2018

Token distribution

• N/A

Token allocation

• N/A

Flags

Real Team: ✅
GitHub: ✅
Smart Contract: - Not yet available
Working Product: ❌ Demo available
+2 yr Vesting for team: -
Have a company: ✅
Transparent: -

IcoCheck

• Added to icocheck.io
• Discuss this project and others on ICO Check Telegram Group chat https://t.me/checkico

[gaia]

Red Flag https://twitter.com/ICODrops/status/976104225796214786
But Artia M gave the following reply in a private slack:

1. We are not currently doing an ICO

2. We haven’t accepted any capital since our last announced round of financing

3. We are not raising $350M nor are we looking to raise anywhere near that amount, not sure where that number came from

4. We’re actively looking for ways to get the community involved in a compliant way

5. Over 50% of tokens are certainly not going to team, also not sure how that one was fabricated
   As a more general point, we always try to be thoughtful about how we move forward and a changing regulatory landscape makes timelines harder to solidify. There will always be rumors from less reputable sources that we won’t have time to respond to so please reserve judgement until official announcements are made

[jens-christian]

With zero prior knowledge of DFINITY I spent this evening reading the “DFINITY White Paper Consensus system” which I consider the core technical paper. I spent 4 hours and here are my immediate thoughts.

Overall this feels like a work of quality. It is evident that a lot of effort and talent has gone into producing this white paper. I can probably answer many of my open question myself with further study, I get no sense that they are handweaving anywhere.

Some notable plusses

DFINITY explicitly addresses CAP and chooses consistency over availability. This should be obligatory for any financial transactional system but is still “forgotten” even in some top 10 coins. In case of network failure, a user will accept a payment being declined but he will not accept being fooled by a double-spend. Sounds pretty basic to me.

The paper describes an underlying random beacon powering the consensus and smart contract layer. The beacon is based on a verifiable random function (VRF). I have studied VRFs and while DFINITY is not the first coin to propose the use of VRFs it still seems a great fit for crypto in general and for their algorithm in particular.

DFINITY does not rely on clients having synchronized clocks. While I never got around to understanding why, it is still a step ahead of some of the competition.

A few minusses/open questions

The use of committees, VRF and “rounds” for consensus makes me wonder if they are at odds with the Algorand patents. I got some Algorand vibe reading it. I am no lawyer so no clue, but could it be an issue?

I didn’t find any description of the incentive of running a client?

Protection against sybil attacks is left as an exercise to the reader? They seem to require stake deposits...

“Scales to millions of clients” and “transaction time in seconds” claims but no empirical evidence in terms of a working prototype or a network simulation analysis in the paper?

There are a ton of attack vectors I didn’t find addressed. Maybe I need to study more, but I kept thinking “How many bad actors is required to deny service of the system? Can an adversary prevent clients from registering their public keys? Can he ddos committee members once they make themselves known?...”

Anyways, good luck to them. Technical foundation seems legit to me. Level of ambition of the overall project seems quite high. Nothing wrong with that, though.

All in my humble opinion. Do you own research!